


Vectors of Approach and Departure

by Tamoline



Category: Alliance-Union - C. J. Cherryh
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-13
Updated: 2013-11-13
Packaged: 2017-12-29 16:39:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1007672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tamoline/pseuds/Tamoline
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An object in space will tend to stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force.</p>
<p>Or:</p>
<p>The things that brought Meg to Sal are the same things that are taking her away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vectors of Approach and Departure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cordialcount](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordialcount/gifts).



The sharp, cold stench of dock air hits Sal's nose as the airlock catch releases. Oil and chemicals and the Corp being too damn cheap to heat this part of the station properly.

Meg slips past her, all shaggy red hair, unkempt from three months out in the Belt, and skin and bones from the combination of too little heavy time and minimal rations. Each extra pound of food is one more pound the engines have to move.

Mass costs, and no one's going to pay you one credit more for being well fed.

Margins are slim enough as it is.

"Ready to give some corp-rats their thrills?" she asks with a grin.

Sal runs a hand through her hair one last time, then follows Meg as she pushes off down the aerial towards Customs. The rats down here are hardly worth her time, but with the proper distraction, well...

MamBitch doesn't like any Freerunner to keep their own charts after a trip to the Belt. Wants to keep them as dependent as possible on the dregs from her teat. 

Any good Runner - meaning any Runner still in business - has a different view on the matter, of course.

The men in uniform blocking the exit to the docking aerial aren't exactly at the top of any Corp org chart. 

Severe amounts of At-ti-tude, though.

Meg vectors there ahead of her, attracting as much attention as she can with smiles and looks and laughs. Sal, following in her wake, does the same, only turned down a notch. Even in their current state, the guards eat it up. Most of them are just jeune fils and all of them are too junior to have the pull to be assigned somewhere else, anywhere but the poorest part of the zero-g docks on the station.

There might be more women in the Corp than among the Runners, but not many that'd be willing to look at someone who can't score anything any higher.

Priorities. MamBitch teaches that as much as life in the Runners. More even - in the Academy, it was easy to tell who was going somewhere, and who wasn't, and it had precious little to do with test scores.

It doesn't take much to get past Customs. A little light flirting, Meg taking lead, and they're pushing off towards the elevator, datacard containing their charts hidden somewhere Sal has zero intention of letting them search.

She drifts a little, just to enjoy the last moments of zero g. It may not be healthy - it's a constant effort to keep in shape out in the Belt - but it's *simple*. Makes sense. Things travel in straight lines.

It's something she can appreciate.

In g, everything is curves.

Meg reaches the elevator first, then pushes off against one side just so she can spin around to grin tauntingly at Sal. "Too slow, jeune fille. Pilot beats numbers, yet again."

Sal rolls her eyes as she glides in after her. "Thought you'd need the extra credits for hair dye," she says, and fishes out the card containing her credits, slotting it in and hitting the button for Helldeck.

"Low blow, Aboujib. Low blow," Meg says as the door hisses closed. They both reach up to take hold, and then for each other as the elevator judders downwards. First a brief push up by the acceleration, then a steady tugging to the left, Meg pressing into her, just the way they like it, the centre of the pull moving downwards as they progress down the floors, the g increasing all the while.

And all the while, they kiss.

Because being back at the refinery isn't downtime - not at all. For two miners without a vessel to call their own, it's a constant battle to hire their next two man ship off a more fortunate Runner at a rate that's not too extortionate. 

All the while keeping their living costs as low as possible.

And to do that, they have to use *all* of the tools at their disposal. 

For as long as they're together.

0.1...0.2...0.3...0.4...0.5...0.6...0.7...0.8...finally the 0.9g of Helldeck.

The doors slide apart, and so do they.

Despite their protesting joints, the almost Earth gravity applied too suddenly to their bodies still used to the Belt, they're here on Helldeck, the heaviest, most expensive g a spacer is likely to see. 

It's where spacers like to live at dock.

It's where the best shops and services are.

And it's the start of another day of work.

 

The Asteroid Belt is cold and dark and the vast majority of it is brut empty. And then there's the fact that the Corp's only interested in certain kinds of asteroid - generally the more metal, the better.

The kind of rocks that exist everywhere apart from in the sector they've been handed, apparently.

Sal swears loudly as the numbers work out - again - that the asteroid she's been looking at is probably mostly ice with a few flecks of rock embedded in it.

Someone at Big Mama - Belt Management - Mam*Bitch* must really have it in for them. Runners in general never get the rich sectors, but this- They've had a brut lack of luck this run so far. They're two months out, and they haven't even broken even for the trip yet.

She rubs her eyes, adjust the optics and starts again.

A numbers' job is never done.

A few hours later, and she manages to locate a rock that's probably worth the effort of investigating.

Finally.

She's a good enough pilot to set the course herself. 

But Meg's better.

She learned more from her during their time together than the instructors at the Academy had ever taught her.

And now...

Now it just seems wisest to try and pick up every last trick she can.

While she has the chance.

She pushes away from the controls, towards the humming spin cylinder and hits the stop button. After it's wound down, she opens the hatch.

Meg, quelle surprise, still looks like she's sleeping like a baby, strapped unmoving to the side as she is.

Sal doesn't believe it for a second. She presses a hard kiss to her lips - Meg doesn't respond - and starts sliding a hand down her side, until she feels Meg start to grin against her.

"Morning," Meg says in that motherwell way of hers - where the word morning *means* something, where it's something people say to each other. "Found something for me, or just want a distraction?"

Sal snorts. "If I wanted a distraction, I'd damn sure try and get you out of the cylinder first." As attractive as sex under g might seem after even a few weeks out, using a cylinder under spin is just brut impractical. As every kid with hormones finds out, sooner or later.

Meg unstraps herself and pushes herself out of the cylinder.

"Well, Aboujib, let's see what you've got for me. Maybe we can turn this trip around."

Or at least keep our heads afloat, Sal thinks.

 

An hour later, and they're getting ready for war. Sal finishes up putting her hair in a tight french braid, then turns to examine the full effect.

Professionally cut, bright blue highlights contrasting with her natural black.

Not bad, Aboujib, not bad.

Beside her, Meg's still halfway through braiding what remains of her hair - the sides of her head having been shaved clean; trez rab.

It's a lot of effort, but both Theo and Padrami appreciate braids. 

Claim it gives them something to hang onto.

And they're going to need every bit of leverage they can get.

"Want some help with that, Kady?" she asks, starting to move over even before she gets a nod in response.

With two sets of hands, it goes much quicker - and also offers up the opportunity for a few last kisses to the back of Meg's pale neck before they start applying makeup.

She goes for strong and bold - subtlety is wasted on Theo - whereas Meg goes for a more slightly more muted approach.

Then it's just time for the final touches - jewellery and such - before they leave their rented room at The Black Hole.

Theo and Padrami aren't hard to find - slouched around a table in the bar. Padrami is scowling over his drink, as ever, but Theo at least manages to muster a smile for them.

For her, really.

Of course, he hasn't had the news yet.

She slides into the seat next to him, Meg taking the place alongside Padrami, pulling him into a long, slow kiss, enough even to dislodge his sour expression temporarily.

"Hello, lover," Sal says, resting her hand on top of his.

Theo's expression changes not one bit.

Damn.

"So, how much do you have for me?" he asks.

She suppresses a wince and tells him how much he's getting for his fifteen and twenty.

"What?" he says, twisting around to stare at Padrami, who hurriedly uncouples from Meg. "I *thought* you assured me that these two could mine worth a damn."

Sal briefly sees red. May not have their own ship, but they wouldn't still be Runners if they couldn't pull their own damn weight.

Theo knows this.

Should *damn* well know this.

Meg clearly reads her expression damn loud and clear, opens her mouth before Sal has a chance to.

"Hey, Theo," she says softly, focussing his attention on her, away from Sal. "It's a bad run. MamBitch screwed us. Severe. You *know* how that is, cher. It happens. But maybe we can throw in a little something to help ease the pain," she adds, sliding towards Theo.

Sal manages to shove the anger far down, where it won't interfere with biz-ness. Meg has the right idea. Theo may have a case of Severe At-ti-tude, but they can't afford to burn bridges here, not with someone who is willing to hire out their ship to them for the standard rate. Which these days is a lot less standard than it used to be, with the Corp squeezing the Runners for everything they can get.

And this is a dance she knows - that they know. 

Flirt, to eke out every advantage they can. Free food, free drinks, making sure that they can hire out a ship on a semi-regular basis.

More, when they really need to, or the going gets really tough.

Switch, when it looks like someone might be getting a little fixated on just one of them.

To survive out here, they need to use every trick they can.

Padrami looks briefly disconsolate, before Sal moves in to take his mind off his loss. May not have much in the way of looks, entirely too much in the way of Attitude, especially for a junior partner. But brut certain the man can kiss.

Of course, to ease things here, after a bad trip, even if it was just due to a bad hand, they're going to have to do a lot more than just kiss. There's going to be a lot of smoothing over - they'll be paying for Theo and Padrami's drinks and meals, as well as more concrete reminders that there are definite advantages to being in business with two of the few women amongst the Runners.

It's going to cost them more than they can really afford, before this is through. Especially on the back of a bad trip.

But that's just the roll of the dice. 

You roll with the punches and move on, as long as you're able.

That's just the way they are.

For now.

 

Sal wakes up as she feels the g of acceleration hit, even through that of the spin cylinder. She hits the off switch, unstraps herself, undoes the hatch and pushes herself out.

"Why are we changing course?" she asks Meg. There hadn't been any rocks even potentially of interest in anything like this volume of space.

Meg doesn't reply, just makes a few more adjustment burns in response.

Clearly she's not going to get an answer there. She rarely does when Meg's in one of these moods.

The optics are a little more enlightening. Meg's syncing velocities with a rock. Not a bad sized one, either.

But there hadn't been a rock like that within range. Not one that wasn't...

She checks the radio, and swears. "What the hell do you think you're doing, Kady?" she hisses. "That's a corp rock."

It isn't as though she's opposed to clipping someone else's rock when they need to - when times are tough. They'll probably even have to do it this time. Hopefully no one they know or like too well, but...

Well, if it comes to it, if it's between clipping a friend's rock, and going back without enough mass...

They'll just have to try and make it up when they're doing a little better.

And MamBitch doesn't care, if one Runner steals from another. Somehow, checks against samples logged by Runners almost always seem to just get skipped, unless someone in that part of the Corp has a grudge against you.

But try and log something taken from one of MamBitch's rocks, and it's a whole different matter.

Meg tenses that pretty jaw of hers and says. "Not going to clip that rock, jeune fille. Not my plan at all."

She finishes synching with the rock, attaches a tether, then pushes away from the controls.

Sal grabs her with a hand as she goes past, and they both go spinning, a tightly bound binary system.

"Few enough credits as it is, and you're intent on wasting more?"

Meg shoots Sal a stubborn look, then wrenches free, spinning further out of control, before stabilising herself and pushing off towards the airlock. 

Sal throws up her hands in frustration, but lets her go. Meg may be the best partner - in more than one sense - she's ever had, but on occasion... Meg's motherwell, and sometimes she doesn't track at all, her thoughts more like the curves of a gravity well than the straight lines of the Belt. Meg swiftly suits up, then steps into the airlock, closing the inner door behind her. Sal hears the compressors go - not perfect, never perfect, so that's more money this is costing her - then silence.

Sal grits her teeth, but returns to the controls, to keep an eye on Meg using the optics. Pushing herself down the tether, Meg swiftly reaches the rock. Apparently the rock is magnetic enough for her boots to work, because she doesn't waste fuel using manoeuvre jets to traverse the surface. She walks over to the corp beacon; pries it loose before propelling it away from the rock as hard as she can.

When the inner door finally hisses open again after Meg returns, Sal's already floating there, in front of the airlock, looking quietly furious.

"Trez rab," she says, bitterly. "Trez rab indeed, Kady. Was that *really* worth wasting money on?"

Meg instantly regains that stubborn look in her eyes. "The Corp screws us and screws us, and tells us this is just the way things are, that there's nothing we can do about it, about them."

"And this is what? Changing that?"

"It's..." she says, then seems to almost fold in on herself. "It's *something*," she whispers. "I'm costing them something."

Sal could tell her what she already knows - that this is a pinprick, the company won't even notice against a background of the day-to-day beacon losses.

That even if they did, it wouldn't be the Corp that loses money - they'd find a way to screw it from someone else.

Meg's all curves, but sometimes hope is worth a little something.

Worth a little money.

Sal's anger... doesn't exactly dissolve, but she manages to swallow it, focus it. She takes Meg's head in her hands and kisses her, hard, trying to let the anger flow through her lips, ground itself through Meg.

Maybe she can let this go. 

This once.

Especially if this is going to be their last trip together.

 

Sal sees Meg across the width of the Black Hole, talking with some jeune fils, so fresh from the Academy she can practically see the uniform still on him.

Trez extraordinaire to see someone like that in here. Trez plus extraordinaire. The Academy likes to funnel its students straight into nice, neat little corp-rat jobs. The Academy likes to look down on Runners, says the only people who join them are failures and misfits.

Just the thought of the Academy makes her blood simmer, and it takes an effort to shove the anger back down where it belongs.

She has no idea what Meg's doing talking with someone like that, anyway. Not they've talked in several days - Meg has been busy courting Bird. Bird's the oldest miner left in this part of the Belt. He owns his own ship, his old partner recently cashed out, and he's been looking for someone to take his place.

She can't blame Meg for taking the opportunity.

Part share of a ship. It's one of the things they've both been dreaming of, since...

Well since they've been in the Runners.

Bird, in Sal's opinion, could do a lot worse as well. He's also motherwell - true motherwell in his case - grew up buried under kliks of atmosphere, with all the air and heat and heavy time he could want. Thinks in the same kinds of curves that Meg does.

Bird came in a few weeks ago, and Meg's been stuck to him ever since.

Apart from right at the moment, apparently.

Sal stifles a brief impulse to go over, find out what Meg's doing. Like as not, it's not her business anymore, anyway.

She's got her own appointment to keep, anyway.

The Shepherds live in a far better part of the station. Still Helldeck - like all spacers - but with much finer furnishings.

Shepherds aren't Corp - are independents - but they're organised. The Corp can't squeeze them too hard, unless they want their cargoes to take a dive in the Well.

Shepherds like Sal's mother had been, before she'd gotten fried.

Mitch with his trez nice haircut, in his trez nice uniform, is waiting for her in his trez nice room. "Good to see you again, Aboujib. Finally come to your senses?"

She grits her teeth, swallows her automatic response, forces her gaze downwards and nods. "Kady's looking to find her own way."

"Good," he says, then smiles. "She's a well that you've been stuck orbiting for far too long. The place we were hoping to offer you - that's gone. But with enough hard work, enough that I can show the other Shepherds that you'd be an asset, despite..." he trails off. "No need to go over old ground."

She nods again, tightly, then listens as he details a few 'minor' things she can do around the station to earn her way back into their graces.

Joining the Shepherds had been her dream from when she was a child until... well, until she met Meg.

Now, with Meg drifting ever further away...

Maybe it could be her dream again.

 

Catching a Beam back to the station is a long, slow and above all boring process. No need for a pilot, precious little for numbers - just enough to make sure that the million-to-one chance of catching an errant rock doesn't occur.

It leaves a lot of free time, for the both of them.

There's heavy time in the cylinder, of course, and exercise to prepare them for full time g again, as well as other, more fun kinds of exercise - casual, unhurried sex of the sort they never have time for aboard station.

But there's also time to just be. Just enjoy each other's company, endless conversations that go everywhere - past, present, future.

This time, though- This time there's Bird and the unspoken knowledge that the next time they go out, it's probably going to be with different partners.

They don't *have* any future, barely any present and without that, Sal can't even bring herself to talk about the past.

All that's left is sleep and exercise, interspersed with a kind of desperate sex they've never had before.

Never going to have again.

It's with either relief or a crushing despair that Sal greets their arrival back at station.

She's really not sure which.

 

Meg's waiting, slumped, on Sal's bed when she gets back to her room that night, a prospect from the Black Hole tucked under her arm.

Sal freezes, then sends her companion away, despite his protests. It's the waste of a night's flirting - free drinks aside. She doubts that he's going to be at all pliable in the morning, and now that she hasn't got a partner, she has to starting looking out for herself more.

But...

It's Meg.

She settles beside her on the bed, and wraps an arm around her. "What's wrong?"

"Bird found someone else," Meg says dully.

Sal tenses, then forces herself to relax. "Oh?"

"A jeune fils straight out of Academy. Fresh set of numbers, and credits too," she closes her eyes, and burrows her head slightly against Sal's shoulder. "Still got room for an old fool?" she asks,

"You're not old," Sal says, and turns her around so she can kiss her fiercely. 

Thirty something's not old, not even in the Belt.

She slides her hands down, so she can slip them beneath Meg's top and lift.

She can't bring herself to answer in any other way. 

Certainly not to ask about the connection between Bird's new partner and the jeune fils she saw Meg talking to earlier today.

And never to ask whether Meg might have spiked her own chances, given herself her an excuse to stay with Sal.

Because all the answers she needs are here in this bed tonight.

Their bed, just for the night.

Tomorrow, they can be on again.

Tomorrow, they can do their best to survive until the next job.

Tomorrow, she can tell Mitch to get screwed, because - always and forever - she's caught around Meg's well.

Or maybe Meg's caught around hers. It's sometimes brut hard to tell.

And tonight is theirs.

Just theirs.

Orbiting around each other's mass points.

And that's all she needs, for now.


End file.
